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FILMSTUD 213:Global Melodrama (FILMSTUD 413)

Commonly derided for being over the top, with films in this mode put down as weepies, tear-jerkers, and women's films, melodrama as a genre and a cinematic mode has been reclaimed by feminist and film scholars as providing a powerful site of ideological struggle. In this course, we will develop a historical and theoretical framework to examine how this popular dramatic mode, centered around the family, the home, and personal relationships affords radical critiques of and insights into discourses of gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation.n nWe will consider melodrama's careful calibration of sensation and affect through its employment of emotions, pathos, and sweeping performative gestures that afford a sustained engagement with individual and social subjection and suffering. Through an analysis of films from Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and by auteurs such as Sirk, Ghatak, Fassbinder, and Almodovar, among others, the course encourages an exploration of global and transnational flows in the adoption of the politics and aesthetics of the melodramatic mode.

FILMSTUD 259:Game Studies (FILMSTUD 459)

This course aims to introduce students to the emerging, interdisciplinary field of game studies. We will investigate what games (including but not limited to digital games) are, why we play them, and what the functions of this activity might be. The bulk of the course will be devoted specifically to digital games, which we will approach from a variety of perspectives: from historical, cultural, industrial/commercial, media-theoretical, and formal (narratological/ludological) perspectives, among others. Thus, we will seek to understand the contexts in which video games emerged and evolved, the settings in which they have been played, and the discourses and practices that have determined their place in social and cultural life. In addition, we will ask difficult questions about the mediality of digital games: What is the relation of digital to non-digital games? Are they both games in the same sense, or do digital media redefine what games are or can be? How do digital games relate to ot
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This course aims to introduce students to the emerging, interdisciplinary field of game studies. We will investigate what games (including but not limited to digital games) are, why we play them, and what the functions of this activity might be. The bulk of the course will be devoted specifically to digital games, which we will approach from a variety of perspectives: from historical, cultural, industrial/commercial, media-theoretical, and formal (narratological/ludological) perspectives, among others. Thus, we will seek to understand the contexts in which video games emerged and evolved, the settings in which they have been played, and the discourses and practices that have determined their place in social and cultural life. In addition, we will ask difficult questions about the mediality of digital games: What is the relation of digital to non-digital games? Are they both games in the same sense, or do digital media redefine what games are or can be? How do digital games relate to other (digital as well as non-digital) non-game media, such as film, television, print fiction, or non-game computer applications? Of course, to engage meaningfully with these questions at all will require us to investigate theories of mediality (including inter- and transmediality) more generally. Finally, though, we will be interested in the formal and experiential parameters that define (different types of) digital games in particular. What does it feel like to play (various) digital games? What are the relations between storytelling and the activity of gameplaying in them? What is the relation between these aspects and the underlying mechanics of digital games, as embodied in hardware and software? What is the role of the human body? Because these questions can only be approached on the basis of personal experience, students will be expected to spend some time playing digital games and reflecting critically on their gameplay.

Course on the history of twentieth and twenty-first century American images of space and how they shape conceptions of the universe. Covers representations made by scientists and artists, as well as scientific fiction films, TV, and other forms of popular visual culture. Topics will include the importance of aesthetics to understandings of the cosmos; the influence of media and technology on representations; the social, political, and historical context of the images; and the ways representations of space influence notions of American national identity and of cosmic citizenship.

This three-quarter sequence asks big questions of major texts in the European and American tradition. What is a good life? How should society be organized? Who belongs? How should honor, love, sin, and similar abstractions govern our actions? What duty do we owe to the past and future? The second quarter focuses on the transition from the Middle Ages to Modernity, Europe's re-acquaintance with classical antiquity and its first contacts with the New World. Authors include Dante, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Cervantes, and Milton.

This three-quarter sequence asks big questions of major texts in the European and American tradition. What is a good life? How should society be organized? Who belongs? How should honor, love, sin, and similar abstractions govern our actions? What duty do we owe to the past and future? This third and final quarter focuses on the modern period, from the rise of revolutionary ideas to the experiences of totalitarianism and decolonization in the twentieth century. Authors include Locke, Mary Shelley, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, Primo Levi, and Frantz Fanon.

Even if many of us don't fully believe in an afterlife, we remain fascinated by visions of it. This course focuses on Near-Death Experiences and the stories around them, investigating them from the many perspectives pertinent to the growing field of narrative medicine: medical, neurological, cognitive, psychological, sociological, literary, and filmic. The goal is not to understand whether the stories are veridical but what they do for us, as individuals, and as a culture, and in particular how they seek to reshape the patient-doctor relationship. Materials will span the 20th century and come into the present. Taught in English.

FRENCH 87N:The New Wave: How The French Reinvented Cinema

Focus on the French New Wave's cinematic revolution of 1959-1962. In a few years, the Nouvelle Vague delivered landmark works such as Truffaut's 400 Blows, Godard's Breathless, Chabro's Le Beau Serge or Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour, and changed forever the way we make and think about movies. Why did these films look so radically fresh? What do they say about France's youth culture in the early 60s? How is the author's theory behind them still influencing us today? Focus is on cultural history, aesthetic analysis, interpretation of narrative, sound and visual forms. Taught in English.

FRENCH 112:Oscar Wilde and the French Decadents (FRENCH 312)

Close reading of Oscar Wilde's work together with major texts and authors of 19th-century French Decadence, including Symbolism, l'art pour l'art, and early Modernism. Points of contact between Wilde and avant-garde Paris salons; provocative, creative intersections between (homo)erotic and aesthetic styles, transgression; literary and cultural developments from Baudelaire to Mallarmé, Huysmans, Flaubert, Rachilde, Lorrain, and Proust compared with Wilde's Salomé, Picture of Dorian Gray, and critical writings; relevant historical and philosophical contexts. All readings in English; all student levels welcome.

FRENCH 129:Camus (CSRE 129, HISTORY 235F)

"The Don Draper of Existentialism" for Adam Gopnik, "the ideal husband of contemporary letters" for Susan Sontag, and "the admirable conjunction of a man, of an action, and of a work" for Sartre, Camus embodies the very French figure of the "intellectuel engagé," or public intellectual. From his birth in 1913 into a poor family in Algeria to the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, from Saint Germain-des-Prés to his predilection for the mediterranean culture, Camus captured the quest for universalism, for the politics of justice, and engaged in the great ethical battles of his time, from the fight against nazism and communism, from questioning colonial rules to the haunting Algerian War, and his complex "silence" over the war. Camus the Algerian, Camus the moralist, Camus the Resistant: through readings and films, we will explore his multiple, long-lasting legacies. Readings from Albert Camus, Kamel Daoud, Mouloud Feraoun, Alice Kaplan, Orhan Pamuk, A.B. Yehoshua, Assia Djebar, Jean-Paul Sartre, Yasmina Khadra. Movies include "The Stranger," and "Far from Men." This course is a gateway for French Studies, with special emphasis on oral proficiency. Taught in French.

FRENCH 130:Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance French Literature

Introduction to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The birth of a national literature and its evolution. Literature as addressing cultural, philosophical, and artistic issues which question assumptions on love, ethics, art, and the nature of the self. Readings: epics (La Chanson de Roland), medieval romances (Tristan, Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain), post-Petrarchan poetics (Du Bellay, Ronsard, Labé), and prose humanists (Rabelais, Montaigne). Taught in French. Prerequisite:
FRENLANG 124 or consent of instructor.